The Last Day of Summer: Photographs

Review
"In the fifty-eight images of this handsome, cleanly designed monograph, Sturges sustains a delicate balance on a very precarious wire. He engages us through the tension of polarities: between public and private, between tact and frankness, between childhood and adolescence, between male and female, between artist and model...His purity of intent shines through in the images. His struggle is to observe and render his subjects in all of their complexities, trembling on the cusp of change. The result of this long-term, communal effort is one of the most clear-eyed, responsible investigations of puberty and the emergence of sexuality in the medium's history, making a metaphor of the metamorphosis from child to adult."--A. D. Coleman, The New York Observer

"This is a truly beautiful and compelling group of photographs, an expression of innocence not lost by knowledge."--Eric Fischl

"The gelatin silver prints luxuriate in textures of sand, flesh, cloth, tide pools and gentle waves...superbly printed, expressive in their modulations of light and joyful tonalities...the high mark of Sturges' work is its naturalness, its gentle attentions to the pleasure that can be found in life."--Kelly Wise, The Boston Globe


Book Description
The photographs of Jock Sturges are the record of people he cherishes: mothers and daughters, friends, children. Before his 8 x 10 camera, they show their relationship not only to one another, but also of the inner self to the world. Magical in their detail, these images are a collaboration of trust and admiration between artist and subject. Jayne Anne Phillips's compelling prose both illuminates the photographs and explores the unending sensuality and complexity of the bond between mother and child.

Whether photographing on naturist beaches in the south of France, in the communes of northern California, or in the affluent, East Coast summer resort of Block Island, Jock Sturges is at home with his subjects. Many of them are families with whom he has deep ties and whom he photographs as they are, clothed or nude, revealing the iconography of family affection. Each summer Sturges returns to visit the friends whose uninhibited grace, warmth, and beauty he so lyrically captures. He is now making pictures of girls and boys whose parents he first photographed as children.

In 1990 the Federal Bureau of Investigation entered Jock Sturges's San Francisco studio and seized his work, implying violation of child pornography laws. Citizens, artists and the media responded with outrage. With The Last Day of Summer, Aperture accords to Jock Sturges's humane and lovely visions the dignity and respect it so richly deserves.


About the Author
Jock Sturges received a B.A. in Perceptual Psychology and Photography from Marlboro College in Vermont and an M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute. He has exhibited widely in the United States as well as in France and Japan. His photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

Jayne Anne Phillips has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Guggenheim fellowship in 1987. She has published two books of short stories, Black Tickets (1979) and Fast Lanes (1987), and a novel, Machine Dreams (1984).



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J. Eddy Hoover writhes in his crypt. This is at least the fourth printing of Sturges' splendid collection of figure studies since the FBI raided his studio in 1991. (A federal grand jury slapped down the fascists.) We missed "Last Day" when it was published in 1991; when Aperture sent a copy of "Radiant Identities", his second book, we realized our error. Predictably less ambitious, less polished than the later book, "Last Day" is yet a work of elegance. Poignant large format photos are reproduced in very fine duotone. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.


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